PARK CITY, Utah—As President Barack Obama prepared to be sworn in for his second term as the 44th president of the United States, two courageous journalists premiered a documentary at the annual Sundance Film Festival. “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield” reaffirms the critical role played by independent journalists like the film’s director, Rick Rowley, and its narrator and central figure, Jeremy Scahill. The increasing pace of U.S. drone strikes, and the Obama administration’s reliance on shadowy special forces to conduct military raids beyond the reach of oversight and accountability, were summarily missed over the inaugural weekend by a U.S. press corps obsessed with first lady Michelle Obama’s new bangs. “Dirty Wars,” along with Scahill’s forthcoming book of the same title, is on target to break that silence … with a bang that matters.

Scahill and Rowley, no strangers to war zones, ventured beyond Kabul, Afghanistan, south to Gardez, in Paktia province, a region dense with armed Taliban and their allies in the Haqqani network, to investigate one of the thousands of night raids that typically go unreported.

Scahill told me: “In Gardez, U.S. special operations forces had intelligence that a Taliban cell was having some sort of a meeting to prepare a suicide bomber. And they raid the house in the middle of the night, and they end up killing five people, including three women, two of whom were pregnant, and … Mohammed Daoud, a senior Afghan police commander who had been trained by the U.S.”

Scahill and Rowley went to the heart of the story, to hear from people who live at the target end of U.S. foreign policy. In Gardez, they interviewed survivors of that violent raid on the night of Feb. 12, 2010. After watching his brother and his wife, his sister and his niece killed by U.S. special forces, Mohammed Sabir was handcuffed on the ground. He watched, helpless, as the U.S. soldiers dug the bullets out of his wife’s corpse with a knife. He and the other surviving men were then flown off by helicopter to another province.

Sabir recounted his ordeal for Rowley’s camera: “My hands and clothes were caked with blood. They didn’t give us water to wash the blood away. The American interrogators had beards and didn’t wear uniforms. They had big muscles and would fly into sudden rages. By the time I got home, all our dead had already been buried. Only my father and my brother were left at home. I didn’t want to live anymore. I wanted to wear a suicide jacket and blow myself up among the Americans. But my brother and my father wouldn’t let me. I wanted a jihad against the Americans.”

Before leaving, Scahill and Rowley made copies of videos from the cellphones of survivors. One demonstrated that it was not a Taliban meeting, but a lively celebration of the birth of a child that the raid interrupted. Rowley described another video: “You can hear voices come over it, and they’re American-accented voices speaking about piecing together their version of the night’s killings, getting their story straight. You hear them trying to concoct a story about how this was something other than a massacre.”

The film shows an image captured in Gardez, by photographer Jeremy Kelly, sometime after the massacre. It showed a U.S. admiral named McRaven, surrounded by Afghan soldiers, offering a sheep as a traditional gesture seeking forgiveness for the massacre. The cover-up had failed.

William McRaven headed the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. Following the thread of JSOC, painstakingly probing scarcely reported night raids, traveling from Afghanistan to Yemen to Somalia, Scahill’s reporting, along with Rowley’s incredible camerawork, constructs for the first time a true, comprehensive picture of JSOC and Commander in Chief Obama’s not-so-brave new world.

The Inauguration Day drone strike in Yemen was the fourth in as many days, along with a similar increase in strikes in Pakistan. The Washington Post reported that Obama has a “playbook” that details when drone strikes are authorized, but it reportedly exempts those conducted by the CIA in Afghanistan and Pakistan. On Inauguration Day, Obama officially nominated John Brennan, a strong advocate for the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that many call torture, and architect of the drone program, to head the CIA.

With the film “Dirty Wars,” co-written with David Riker and directed by Rowley, Jeremy Scahill is pulling back the curtain on JSOC, which has lately exploded into the public eye with the torture-endorsing movie “Zero Dark Thirty,” about the killing of Osama bin Laden. When “Dirty Wars” comes to a theater near you, see it. Sadly, it proves the theater of war is everywhere, or, as its subtitle puts it: “The World Is a Battlefield.” As Scahill told me, “You’re going to see a very different reality, and you’re going to see the hellscape that has been built by a decade of covert war.”

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on 1,100 stations in North America. She was awarded the 2008 Right Livelihood Award, dubbed the “Alternative Nobel” prize, and received the award in the Swedish Parliament in December.

Good report from Amy; good work from Scahill & co. Let’s hope this film opens some eyes. I, and many of us, already know this sort of stuff is going on, but maybe the folks in Anytown, USA, will get a glimpse of the awful reality of what our government does across the world.

Kill anything that moves. It has always been the way of empires. How these killers can live with themselves is really the big question. Right up there with that is how do those who make policies leading to this kind of slaughter sleep at night. Callous uncaring killers with no accountability and, in fact, glorified when they return as “HEROES”. It is a sick perversion. Is it surprising then when we turn this violence onto ourselves?

Indeed as writer Nick Turse brings out that that was pretty much the tacit, if not the official, policy of the U.S. military in Vietnam in his incredibly powerful and extremely well written book which bears the title of his tome. What happened so often in Vietnam is now occurring once again overseas as the article notes that:

“You hear them [U.S. soldiers] trying to concoct a story about how this was something other than a massacre.”

It would seem that the U.S. military is continuing on in the less than admirable tradition of what took place in Vietnam when the military there, from Colin Powell on down, tried and succeeded for the most part in covering up the many atrocities that the United States military committed against the Vietnamese. We now have our brave men and women in uniform doing the same thing only it is now taking place in the Middle East instead of Southeast Asia.

Now the Drones are the CIA’s baby no less than the U-2 was their child in the 1950’s. How can we tell if elected officials are calling any shots at all? Amy your show is great but it’s gaping bald spot is growing more apparent every day: a complete failure to integrate the most recent scholarship of the National Security State with other politics. Increasingly, in the word of the Alternative media it seems as if there is a quid pro quo: great stuff on the sculpting of our corporate now in exchange for selling a hollow ahistorical two dimensionalism re the history of our National Security State. Ray McGovern has had some very, very interesting things to say about when the CIA was in it’s teeny bopper years, 13-16. This coincided with some guy who–according to all academic scholarship published since 2000 was a president who was getting out of Vietnam, resisting CIA policies in Brazil, Israel, Indonesia, Cuba, Laos, Congo and towards the Soviet Union over the very basis of the Cold War which served as the ostensible raison d’etre of the emerging US Garrison State. Isn’t it time we take a closer look at the Coup of 1963 in this its 50th anniversary? Isn’t it time we look at the MEDIA IMPLICATIONS of that coup?

Hows bout asking Ray on to talk about this topic? Or are we ONLY allowed to hear Noam’s completely decontexturalized drive by assertions in which he quotes Richard Helms’ top aid. Again.

There was a time when the US left was different. There was a time when this comment could not be so easily put in the ash tray so conveniently labelled “Alex Jones”. The US left now recognizes that shows such as those on MSNBC play a strategic niching role in fragmenting US political communication. Create a channel for the would-be-critics of the Corporate Democrats and the corporations can lower the volume of dissent that the full spectrum hears. Do you think that strategy might be going on … elsewhere on the political spectrum? Mere speculation? Try history. See the history of Encounter Magazine 1950-64. See the great book by Frances Saunders called The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. In England it was called Who Paid The Piper?

Good post, Nathaniel. I’ve always been mystified by Noam’s blind spot as per the JFK assassination as well as the policies of that administration.

As for Alex Jones, his politics may be screwy, but he’s been a pretty good guerilla journalist over the years covering police abuses and secret ops and seems to have some good contacts inside the security-spook establishment, so the left dismisses him at its peril. He certainly didn’t help his credibility with his televised meltdown.

Klovis, as of 7:55 AM I am still deeply suspicious of Alex Jones and why he has so much money to do what he does. Has he often had some great guests? Yes. However, I call this strategy Ashtraying it. In other words put him on Alex Jones, then later when there are mass viewing moments like the incredible circus that MILLIONS SAW not just tens of thousands, it all gets thrown out baby and bathwater style. That is SPECUlation on my part about Alex Jones, but it is informed speculation on account of I have read a fair amount on Cold War Communications history.

I could well be mistaken.

How the heck would I know?

When one speculates like this it is important to label it as such , but that does not mean that historically relavent tributaries should not flow into the river of discussion. Man.

I must say I’ve wondered the same thing at times, even before his blowup. He also seems to play more and more to the peanut gallery of his rightwing audience. I only follow him sporadically, through links at other sites, but I seemed to notice a shift in his rhetoric after the formation of the Tea Party.

But it’s all well known facts and conditions of the post-911 wars to anyone following with a modicum of independent interest. Though this followup documents closer what’s previously established, it’s no new exposure.

That only goes to show how denied the reality of wars and exploitation and other conditions of the populace is in the USA these days.

Over and over again climate extreming is “exposed” as real. The wars of aggression are “exposed” as counterproductive and horribly unfair and destructive. The corporate sweatshops of Bangladesh, India, China and other poor countries are “exposed” as substandard and in breach of international laws. The activities of capitalism and financial institutions are “exposed” as grossly exploitative, fraudulent and unsustainable. And the obvious existence of the human inner world with compassion as a central trait, is “exposed” as denied by the official, competitive paradigm.

All these “exposures” – fine as they are in themselves – regrettably and paradoxically also serve to reinforce the denials, as they imply that these conditions are “news”.

It’s weird to behold how self-evident facts are “exposed” and established over and over again in the public sphere by the corporate media.

What needs to be “exposed” better is the deliberately induced public amnesia in the corporately hijacked main media.

We in the western-dominated global human tribe need a revolution that dispels with the unecological, disharmonious exploitations of most of the human tribe and all of the biosphere that now have been forced to dominate.

There are lots of approaches to do this: anything that increases harmony between people and people, and people and planet is part of the needed revolution. Any action that reduces artificially contrived tensions contributes.

One good place of attack would be to abolish Compound Interest in financial transactions, and use the natural human growth-decline rate of 1.3 % annually as a target for increase in “growth”/change in human activities to offset natural decline.

The Tobin tax introduced in parts of EU now is also a good development.

When corporations aren’t allowed to run rampant, less wars and more peace follows.

All war is dirty. – That’s another of those denials often “exposed” and claimed as news – over and over again. The interests denying that fact and glorifying war, even as “necessary”, are those that need to be “exposed” and stopped.

The MSM wasn’t there because this is pretty much old news. Kudos for the film as it probably serves a purpose for documentation purposes, but it’s a bit too late for anything else.

I’d like to see something on today’s big story: Women now having “opportunities” to serve as murderers for the army. Yes, you too have “opportunities” to murder, maim and destroy for the asshole in the White House. Another notch in the belt of The Man.

Growing up, I distinctly remember seeing films at school showing asian females marching & carrying guns, the narrator saying how communists countries would stoop so low as to make their women fight.

Our nation, using illegal immigration, unemployment, gangs and decades of violence/conditioning through broadcast and film has, finally, turned the female of our species (at least the American ones) into killing machines. Indeed…”Opportunities” but for whom? The State and its awful Empire, or the naive individual who is about to be used.

as i understand it from the military’s pov any person who enlists signs a contract making that person ‘government issue’ as in dehumanized property of the military branch. “our is not to reason why, our is but to do and die.” in my opinion that’s entrapment! during the nam police action, however, a gi speaking up about wanton brutality could choose to protect the truth even if the truth damaged the “good guy” reputation. manning attempted to go the chain-of-command route, but his efforts were rebuffed. what a sad,sad state of affairs!

Also on Common Dream

Like this:

Related

Reblogged this on #opManning and commented:
“You can hear voices come over it, and they’re American-accented voices speaking about piecing together their version of the night’s killings, getting their story straight. You hear them trying to concoct a story about how this was something other than a massacre.”